10 Years of Low End Mac: Looking Back and Looking Forward

Has it really been 10 years since I first posted two dozen pages
about old Macs on my personal website? Yes, it has.

Low End Mac began life as The
New Low End User Site on April 7,
1997. And, yes, the word "New" was in red for the first several
months of our existence.

By June we had added Mac to our name, becoming The New Low End
Mac User Site - just something we did to clarify that we were
looking at the low end of the Mac universe. We soon shortened that
to Low End Mac.

Recognizing a useful resource, Jason Pierce approached me about
moving my fledgling website to his server and making it part of his
MacTimes network. We might even make a few bucks! And in November
1997, we made the move. I still remember the thrill of that first
$42 check received a few months later.

Today I make my living publishing Low End Mac, and I've loved
almost every minute of it. (A couple encounters with Apple Legal
were another story.)

The Low End Vision

LEM began with profiles covering the oldest useful Macs, which
in my opinion meant nothing older than the Mac Plus, which coincidentally had been
the first Mac I had ever used and later became the first Mac I ever
owned. We set out "top end" with the 40 MHz 68030-based Mac IIfx, since there was decent coverage of
the Centris and Quadra models back then.

We eventually expanded coverage to include the 040-based Macs,
PowerBooks, the earliest Macs, and Power Macs, as well as the
primary clone lines, Apple's Lisa, and Jobs' NeXT Computers. The
only Apple computers we didn't profile were the Apple I through
III, the Newtons, and the Apple Network Servers (none of these ran
the Mac OS).

Over the years we have done our best to promote computing value
- using older computers as long as reasonable, upgrading as
necessary, buying refurbished or close-out or used when possible,
and generally steering people away from the leading edge speed
demons, since they tended to be overpriced for a small premium in
speed.

Editorial Content

We began publishing editorial content in July 1997 and added our
first writer, Evan Kleiman, in
January 1999. Charles W. Moore brought his Miscellaneous Ramblings column to LEM from
MacOpinion in Sept. 1999 and has published weekly ever since. Jeff
Adkins has been writing Mac Lab
Report since May 2001, and Alan
Zisman has been publishing content here since Dec. 2001.

Those are just a few of perhaps 30 writers who have made Low End
Mac their home for a while. And in all that time, only two women
have been regular contributors. Julie Fugett was a regular Mac Daniel contributor, and Beverly
Woods, now a nanny on several of our online groups, wrote Acoustic Mac from April 2001 through August
2002, then came back to post a few more articles in 2005.

Growing Success

Mighty oaks grow from small nuts, and Low End Mac's story isn't
much different. We estimate that we served about 20,000 pages in
July 1997. In March 1998, we passed the 100,000 page mark for the
first time, and we served over a quarter million pages in August
1998.

By 2000 we were consistently breaking 400,000 pages per month,
and we broke the million page mark for the first time in January
2002. Traffic levels were pretty steady for three years, and in
October 2005 we began to consistently serve over a million pages
per month.

Our second-best month was January 2006, when we served 1.73
million pages - and we passed that last month, when we came just
shy of serving 1.8 million pages. We now serve about 15 million
pages per year.

Things Change

Way back when, the best thing in the world was getting linked by
MacSurfer, the headline
news service that kept many a website going in the late 90s and
early 00s. We got Slashdotted a few times, bringing in tens of
thousands of hits to a single article.

But we've seen some big changes over the past six months with
the "Web 2.0" thing. In particular, we're suddenly seeing a lot
links to specific articles through Digg and a lot of traffic in general
from StumbleUpon (which
doesn't support Safari, the Mac's default browser, or Camino, my
browser of choice). And we're still seeing quite a bit of traffic
from MacSurfer.

On the search engine front, there's just one thing to say:
Google. That search engine
accounts for over 90% of our traffic coming through search engines,
a stunning achievement.

Finances

One of the keys to Low End Mac's success is sharing the
workload. We have quite a cadre of writers, and the guys at
Backbeat Media have done a wonderful job of selling ad space on the
site.

For those who remember the dot-com bust, the key to survival was
traffic, as ad rates plummeted. Even though we only see a fraction
of a penny in ad income for each page served, multiplying that by a
million pages a month turns it into real money.

We no longer ask for donations, although there was a time 4-6
years ago where it made the difference between sink and swim. And
we're no longer interested in offering subscriptions for ad-free
access to LEM. While we once thought the future was bleak for
ad-supported free websites, we were wrong.

Going Forward

We're refreshing the site today - a new color scheme, slightly
smaller column graphics, moving from the Roman version of the
Eaglefeather font to italic, and a few tweaks to the navigation
system. I've been working on this for a couple months and hope
you'll like it.

We stopped designing for old browsers a few years ago, as 99% of
our visitors use modern ones. We do try to make sure things work in
Camino (the #1 browser at LEM headquarters), Firefox, Safari, and
IE 6 on Windows. We also test with Opera, iCab 3, and some Linux
browsers on occasion.

We oversee about 40 Google
Groups covering almost every aspect of Macintosh computing, and
we're indebted to our volunteer list managers for keeping things
running smoothly there. We started our first email list in 1997,
and they've become an excellent user-to-user resource.

We're phasing out some of the lower-end Macs in our biweekly
price trackers. There aren't a lot of used clamshell iBooks out there any
longer, and too many apps call for a screen bigger than 800 x 600,
so that one was retired. We've stop tracking Kanga prices, as it has never been supported by
OS X, and WallStreet
notebooks may not be far behind. The beige G3 and tray-loading iMacs are on their
last legs with Tiger, and we don't expect to see them supported at
all in Leopard (OS X 10.5).

Low End Mac has always tried to make light demands of your
browser and your Internet connection. We use a lot of optimized GIF
headers, and we tend to resize graphics so they'll load quickly -
when practical, we keep image files under 10 KB in size. We've also
avoided popup ads, Flash content, and sound. And thus far we've
held off on those nasty contextual ads that pop up over your text
if your mouse gets too close to the double-underlined text.

We've been working on a new project for a couple months now,
something we hope to reveal next week.

I'm still amazed at what Low End Mac has become. What started
out as a public service, a way to learn a bit more about the Web,
and a way to share my years of Mac experience has grown from a
hobby into a dream job. Thank you for being part of our community
and our success.

Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986,
sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and
has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.